Let’s start with Jonathan Gruber. I have to say I was disappointed by the hearings. Oh, sure, it was good theater-as-human sacrifice of the sort Washington does so well (though I am glad they stopped short of rectal rehydration).

But this was one of those moments where they really could have put the system on trial. Gruber’s consistent answer was that he’s a shabby, shallow, little man who belittles others, including the American people, to make himself look good. “I tried to make myself seem smarter by demeaning others.”

In almost every exchange, Gruber fell back on language you’d expect from a stockbroker tied up in an S&M dungeon. I did it because I am a flea! A worm! I am no master of the universe, I am nothing! Punnnniissshhh meee!

All that was missing were some riding-crop and melted-candle-wax welts, and maybe a shorn scrotum. Hey man, it’s a defense.

But it’s not a good one. You can blame your arrogance for calling the American voters stupid, but you can’t blame your arrogance for claiming that the bill was designed to hide taxes and deceive the public. If I stab someone 34 times, the jury might want to hear about my arrogance, but whether I’m arrogant or humble, it doesn’t change what I did — and apologizing for it doesn’t clarify where the body is buried.

An old Soviet joke had men carrying briefcases marching alongside tanks and soldiers in a Kremlin parade. “Why are those men in a military parade?” a boy innocently asks his father. He replies, “Those are the economists. They are the most dangerous of all.”

MIT economist Jonathan Gruber’s factually impoverished testimony on Obamacare didn’t get nearly the attention it should have, as congressional Democrats cleverly decided to release a report on CIA torture abuses on the same day. Gruber’s stonewalling about videos in which he boasted that the “stupidity” of the American people and their “lack of transparency” had been the key to passing Obamacare was buried deep inside major papers and ignored by the next morning’s network-TV shows. John Harwood of CNBC dismissed his testimony: “I’m sorry, Gruber is a nothingburger and always has been.” Mark Halperin of Bloomberg News chimed in: “This has been a sideshow. . . . It has no impact whatsoever.”

#a#Halperin will be right if journalists continue to look the other way and fail to probe more deeply into the issues Gruber has raised. The lack of curiosity many of them display about a witness who used variations of “I don’t recall” 20 times during his testimony is remarkable.

The funding for Obama's executive action is coming through the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, a fee, not tax based agency under the jurisdiction of Homeland Security. Because the USCIS is a fee based agency, many have argued Congress cannot defund it. According to the Congressional Research Service, Congress does in fact have the ability to defund the agency through the appropriations process.

A fee-funded agency or activity typically refers to one in which the amounts appropriated by Congress for that agency or activity are derived from fees collected from some external source. Importantly, amounts received as fees by federal agencies must still be appropriated by Congress to that agency in order to be available for obligation or expenditure by the agency. In some cases, this appropriation is provided through the annual appropriations process. In other instances, it is an appropriation that has been enacted independently of the annual appropriations process (such as a permanent appropriation in an authorizing act). In either case, the funds available to the agency through fee collections would be subject to the same potential restrictions imposed by Congress on the use of its appropriations as any other type of appropriated funds.

But lets put that aside for a minute. The larger question is, who is paying these fees? Millions of legal immigrants are paying these fees, which are now being reallocated by the executive branch to legalize millions of illegal immigrants who have been living in the United States for years while failing to go through proper and long established legal channels to obtain citizenship or other legal status.

The original plan looked fairly simple. After much wrath and acrimony, the cromnibus passed the House and moved on to the upper chamber. In order to comply with Senate rules, a five day spending extension would provide a bit more time to get business done and the vote would be held over until Monday. At that time, several people who love having face time with the cameras would make some impassioned speeches, some amendments would be demanded (and fail to pass or even get a vote) and the bill would be passed. The Senators would be able to take the weekend off, put in a few hours on Monday and then head home for the holidays, secure in the knowledge that the government would be funded for an extended period and everyone could work on wrapping their Christmas gifts.

Well, the best laid plans of mice and men…

But in a surprise development, some of McConnell’s junior members defied the agreement after he left....

Their power ebbing, Senate Democrats launched a last-minute drive Saturday to confirm roughly 20 of President Barack Obama's nominees, and several Republicans blamed tea party-backed Texas Sen. Ted Cruz for creating an opening for the outgoing majority party to exploit.

Lawmakers took a break in their intrigue long enough to send Obama legislation that provides funds for the government to remain open until Wednesday at midnight, easing concerns of a shutdown. A separate, $1.1 trillion long-term funding bill remained in limbo.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is keeping senators in Washington for a rare Saturday session—and risking a government shutdown—after he went to extraordinary lengths to block Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) from forcing a vote to block President Barack Obama’s executive amnesty.

What happened on Friday night is a series of procedural tactics that Cruz and Lee engaged in with Reid. Cruz tried to force a constitutional point of order—which requires a 51-vote threshold—to challenge the constitutionality of Obama’s executive amnesty. Meanwhile, Lee was pushing an amendment to the cromnibus spending bill that just passed the House that would have blocked funding for Obama’s executive amnesty implementation.

Using parliamentary tricks, Reid blocked both Cruz’s and Lee’s measures, then sought unanimous consent to adjourn the Senate until Monday—at which time Senators would have been brought back in for passage for the cromnibus. But in consultation with Cruz, Lee objected to unanimous consent to adjourn the Senate until Monday unless Reid would allow a vote on the effort to block funding for Obama’s executive amnesty. Because Reid wouldn’t agree to allow the vote, he decided to keep Senators in Washington for the weekend.

Because Reid needs to, per Senate rules, fill the timeframe until senators can actually vote on cloture on the cromnibus bill—which they can first technically do at 1 AM early Sunday morning—Reid is now attempting to force through several controversial Obama nominees like NRA-opposed surgeon general nominee Vivek Murthy, Deputy Secretary of State nominee Tony Blinken, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) director nominee Sarah Saldana....

Initially, of the groups that supported the now hated Obamacare debacle, perhaps none were so fervently favorable towards the 2,500 page law as unions of all stripes.

My how things have changed since unions are unfortunately experiencing, five years after Obamacare was deceptively crammed down the throats of, who Obamacare Jonathan Gruber repeatedly referred to as, “the stupid American voter.”

A major New York City Union is suing Obama (he is specifically named as a defendant) and his regime, claiming that Obamacare will bankrupt its healthcare fund.

A police union, the Correction Officers Benevolent Association (COBA), is claiming that Obamacare has caused its healthcare costs to skyrocket, and is asking for an exemption from the highly unpopular Democrat Party passed law.

Appearing on FOX News’ “The Real Story” with Gretchen Carlson on Thursday, COBA President Norman Seabrook said that not only is Obamacare bankrupting unions, but will eventually bankrupt the City of New York....

The message is practically on top of the hummingbird geoglyph, which is now surrounded by their footprints. And the irony is thick. The future may be renewable, but these fragile, ancient drawings are not.

"This has been done without any respect for our laws," Peru's deputy minister for culture Luis Jaime Castillo told the press, calling Greenpeace's actions "thoughtless, insensitive, illegal, irresponsible and absolutely pre-meditated." He explained further: "It was done in the middle of the night. They went ahead and stepped on our hummingbird, and looking at the pictures we can see there's very severe damage. Nobody can go on these lines without permission—not even the president of Peru!"

Castillo, unfortunately, isn't exaggerating when he says the damage was severe. This is what the hummingbird drawing looked like before Greenpeace stormed in:

This is what the hummingbird drawing looks like now—the area outlined in red is the damage caused by Greenpeace:

...Overcriminalization has become a national plague. And when more and more behaviors are criminalized, there are more and more occasions for police, who embody the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence, and who fully participate in humanity’s flaws, to make mistakes....

Society needs laws; therefore it needs law enforcement. But “overcriminalization matters” because “making an offense criminal also means that the police will go armed to enforce it.” The job of the police “is to carry out the legislative will.” But today’s political system takes “bizarre delight in creating new crimes” for enforcement. And “every act of enforcement includes the possibility of violence.”

Carter continues: “It’s unlikely that the New York Legislature, in creating the crime of selling untaxed cigarettes, imagined that anyone would die for violating it. But a wise legislator would give the matter some thought before creating a crime. Officials who fail to take into account the obvious fact that the laws they’re so eager to pass will be enforced at the point of a gun cannot fairly be described as public servants.”

Cover girl Ella Watson-Stryker, 34, is a health promoter working with Doctors Without Borders who, according to local blogger Bill Kowinski, also happens to be a 1998 Eureka High School graduate and daughter of Humboldt State sociology professor Betsy Watson.

Money is once more flowing out of Congress to all manner of follies and outrages, thanks to an omnibus spending bill that funds everything except Homeland Security through September of 2015 – throwing away every scrap of leverage the incoming Republican majority could possibly exercise against Emperor Obama, ensuring that no one outside the authors of Democrat Party fundraising email spam will be talking about shutdowns, and effectively neutering freshly-elected conservatives. The GOP leadership can get through another year with its favorite wheezy excuse for not standing up and fighting for anything: Our hands are tied. Sure, the knots are a bit clumsy, but that’s to be expected when you tie your own hands. It’ll be good enough for the permanent Beltway culture, which can have a very merry Christmas, riding their one-horse open sleighs down streets coated with a fresh blizzard of taxpayer dollars, jingling all the way....

The Republican leadership isn’t just bad at standing up for its principles and fulfilling commitments to its voters. It seems institutionally incapable of understanding, as Democrats do, that power won today must be used to set the stage for tomorrow’s elections. Democrats target constituencies and service them, including constituencies that aren’t actually American citizens. Republicans try to figure out how badly they can get away with disappointing their base while they service a Beltway culture some of them fear, and others profit from.

If the Republican leadership was smart, they’d be looping events such as Jonathan Gruber’s disastrous House testimony into a big-picture assault on arrogant, wasteful government, and reminding the hard-working, rules-obeying American taxpayer how much contempt Democrats hold them in. A proper budget debate right after the holidays would be a great way to do that. The Democrats fear nothing more than a sharp Republican Party playing that kind of hardball and appealing directly to the working middle class, which is so comprehensively betrayed by the Democrat philosophy of rewarding its big contributors and powerful special interests at the expense of everyone else. There’s a lot of junk in this “cromnibus” spending bill that could be used to buttress such a case, such as a juicy payoff to outgoing Majority Leader Harry Reid’s casino backers… but then, in order for Republican leaders to make hay over such corruption, they’d have to give up their pork and payoffs, and they don’t want that.

If the Fourteenth Amendment’s mandate is that local governments shall not “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” why then did the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals rule that private property rights are not among the fundamental rights protected by the Due Process Clause? PLF is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to answer that question in Kentner v. City of Sanibel.

Morning Joe regulars Donny Deutsch and former Rep. Harold Ford Jr. (D., Tenn.) weighed in Friday on the recent CIA report, which has been harshly criticized as a strictly partisan report.

“I’m a liberal on this show. I have no problem with it,” Deutsch said. “To be honest with you, these are terrorists. We’re trying to protect ourselves. You got to do what you got to do.”

“I don’t know if I’m turning into a right-winger in my old age. We are not privy to a lot what’s going on in the world. I wonder how many people who lost friends and family — if we had done some of this earlier maybe we could have saved them,” Deutsche said. “If you said to me tomorrow, it’s a gray area but maybe doing this would save my children or my friend’s children, I go yes.”

NBC's "Meet the Press" host Chuck Todd said Friday Americans are likely to be "very forgiving" about a new congressional report that says the CIA has in the past used extreme interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists.

"Indeed just who would want to join our intelligence agencies, knowing they could be so easily sabotaged by people they thought were supporting, not to mention employing, them?"

The dust is far from settled regarding the condemnatory Senate report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s use of so-called torture with terror detainees. CIA Director John Brennan is disputing the report’s claim that those enhanced terror techniques were worthless and netted no information, while Intelligence Committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein insists that her report is correct. Former DCIA Michael Hayden and, not surprisingly, Dick Cheney had weighed in on Brennan’s side the day before.

My first thought was that this was all much ado about nothing. We have been hearing the same arguments about waterboarding and the like for the last six — or is it ten — years with the same people lined up pro and con. None of it is very new, although Feinstein and the media are pretending it is. Moreover, the release of the report was clearly timed to distract from the embarrassing appearance of Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber before Congress. It also was rushed out before the new Republican Congress can deep six it after they are sworn in next year. (They had a point. No Republicans or, more importantly, CIA operatives who actually participated in the actions in question were interviewed for the report.)

All this is SOP in heavily politicized Washington...

But still I put this all down to the usual liberal roundelay with Dianne Feinstein competing against many of her ilk for “Moral Narcissist in Chief,” until I heard an outraged Dennis Miller on the radio Wednesday. He was treating this report as if it was the end of our country as we know it — and he had a point. His reason: who would join the CIA now knowing your own government doesn’t have your back? And we need the CIA more than ever in the covert struggle against the likes of ISIS, Iran, al Qaeda, North Korea, China and Russia.

Neither the process nor the result was pretty. In the end, John Boehner was John Boehner insofar as he wanted more than anything to avoid a government shutdown, which meant he would sacrifice amnesty de-funding to get a spending bill passed if that's what it took. And it did, because 57 Democrats came to his rescue by supporting CRomnibus - even though they were furious about the rollback of some of Dodd-Frank - after 67 Republicans bailed because the bill let Obama's executive amnesty off the hook.

So the bill is a moderate's dream and is hated by both the left and the right, which sets up some interesting dynamics when the Senate takes its turn. But in a way, amnesty doesn't get off the hook entirely...

If Republicans play this right - I know, I know - this could prove to be more of a victory on the amnesty question than it seems today. By passing a bill that funds the entire government except Homeland Security through September, they've removed the Republicans-want-to-shut-down-the-government nonsense from the equation and now set up a situation where Obama pretty much has to negotiate with them come January to get funding restored for DHS.

I think that was always the idea - that you wait until you've really got control of both houses after the first of the year and then you put the squeeze to him. Passing CRomnibus under the current Congress puts you in a stronger position to do that because you take away the shutdown as Obama's opportunity to change the media narrative and make Republicans the bad guys.

In a nod to conservative opposition, Boehner vowed an immigration fight in 2015, when Congress returns with a majority in both houses of Congress.

“[B]y the House’s action, we are setting up a direct challenge to the president’s unilateral actions on immigration next month, when there will be new Republican majorities in both chambers," he announced. "The Senate should act on this bipartisan legislation in short order.”

Earlier this month we talked about a lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General and Governor-elect Greg Abbott. The suit seeks to stop Obama's amnesty actions before they're implemented. At the time, 17 states had joined the suit, as the Chicago Tribune reported:

A coalition of 17 U.S. states sued the Obama administration on Wednesday saying it acted illegally by issuing an executive order to ease the threat of deportation for millions of immigrants who are in the country without the proper documents.

The case being led by Texas and filed at the Federal Court in the Southern District of Texas said the executive order announced by Obama last month violated constitutional limits on presidential powers. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, a Republican and the Texas governor-elect, said the lawsuit is not asking for monetary damages but is seeking to have the order declared illegal.

The new states are:

Arizona
Arkansas
Florida
Michigan
North Dakota
Ohio
Oklahoma

Want more good news? A judge has been assigned to the case, and he's not what you'd call "friendly" toward Obama's goals. He's U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen and, as Townhall reports, he's been highly critical of the Administration’s immigration plans before.... KEEP READING

The documents prove that Lois Lerner met with DOJ’s Election Crimes Division a month before the 2010 elections.

It has to be embarrassing to the DOJ, which may not be the most impartial one to be investigating the IRS. In fact, the DOJ withheld over 800 pages of Lerner documents citing “taxpayer privacy” and “deliberative privilege.” Yet these internal DOJ documents show Ms. Lerner was talking to DOJ officials about prosecuting tax-exempt entities (yes, criminally!) two years before the IRS conceded there was inappropriate targeting....

“No wonder the Department of Justice under Eric Holder has done no serious investigation of the Obama IRS scandal,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “These new documents dramatically show how the Justice Department is up to its neck in the IRS scandal and can’t be trusted to investigate crimes associated with the IRS abuses that targeted Obama’s critics,” he said. “Richard Nixon was impeached for less.”

Perhaps the latter is an overstatement. Yet it is getting harder and harder to simply accept President Obama’s ‘no smidgen of corruption’ remark made to Fox News in February, no matter how sincere and forthright his delivery.

Mr. Nolte did nothing more controversial than read Dunham’s intensely weird memoir, observe that she accused a very specific individual of raping her in college, and conduct the sort of fact-checking safari that Dunham’s publishers are going to deeply regret blowing off...

...Nolte’s piece meticulously details his investigative work, which was Journalism 101 stuff: does this person really exist, what does he have to say for himself, do the details in Dunham’s account check out, and so forth. Dunham’s publishers, and the left-wing media people who comprise the bulk of her audience, did none of this essential groundwork because (a) she is liberal royalty who (b) told a Narrative-friendly account of campus rape which (c) pointedly implicated a Republican. Not a single soul on the Left needed to hear another word, including those given to fact-checking “Saturday Night Live” comedy skits that mock His Sacred Majesty Barack I. (In addition to Narrative validation and the special privileges afforded to liberal aristocracy, one can’t help noticing that liberals don’t mind reading memoirs full of whoppers, notably including Barack Obama’s. They have a boundless appetite for mythology about their heroes, and believe it is important to revere them without question, to demonstrate their fierce devotion to the Cause and its champions.)

As a result of this investigative work, Random House began talking about a settlement with Barry’s lawyers, and committed to modifying future editions of her memoir to make it clear that the name “Barry” is a pseudonym – which, as the excerpt from Breitbart News above points out, is a courtesy extended to several other people Dunham writes about, but not her alleged college rapist.

...Was the media grateful to Breitbart News for doing the job they couldn’t be bothered to do? What do you think? As with every other feminist fairy tale, angry supporters doubled down after the debunking, calling Nolte a “hound of hell,” “creepy” (while he was sitting right there on the same stage!) and, as Emily Shire at the Daily Beast put it, a “rape troll.” The second-funniest part of Shire’s hyperventilating rant is when she gives Nolte grief for repeatedly noting that Dunham repeated went out of her way to identify her accused rapist as a college Republican. Dunham doing this evidently A-OK, but noticing that she did it is verboten. KEEP READING.

If you know what’s good for you Jonathon Gruber, you’ll stay the hell away from me. Why? Because you have done the unpardonable in the eyes of any father – you have brought havoc unto the finances of my youngest daughter – and her newlywed husband.

You see, Dr. Gruber, what you did not only harmed millions of Americans – many of them young – you did so based on arrogance. This is you on all of those videos – glibly counting your fellow citizens as fodder for your tortured contrivances that will ruin, or end, their lives in many cases – without any remorse or perspective whatsoever. This is a damnable quality held by many who hang out in the faculty lounge. And you are obviously eaten up with it....

I submit that you’re detestable with no business whatsoever making grand plans for your planned utopian society. And yet, due to many flaws in our political system – some escalated in just the past six years – you can and you do. These plans never work, and yet, you are paid grotesque sums of money to dream them up.

As you told the Committee Tuesday – in a Lois Lerner-esque tone -- millions of people losing their current coverage was merely “part of the calculation.” Part of the calculation? That’s all this is to you, a mathematical projection?

You arrogant bastard!

These are real lives we are talking about here. And in the case of Congressman Patrick McHenry – whose question prompted your telling response - we’re talking some 473 thousand real lives in his state of North Carolina alone! If the ratios hold, that’s some 12 million nationwide! And that’s before the wave of cancellations that are taking place right now.

Well let me tell you about this damned calculation. My 23 year old daughter, like many others, is facing a tripling, or maybe a quadrupling – or her contribution to her work place provided coverage. Calculate that you smarmy SOB. Yes, I said tripling or maybe quadrupling. The figures are not final yet. She cannot afford this, as the increase alone will swallow about 20% of her take home pay. She is not alone.

And why is this? Well, it is all just part of the calculation. You see, the magnificent bureaucrats who slither to and from government cubicles every day have deemed that the former coverage isn’t up to Obama Care standards. Never mind that the boss liked it, the employees liked it – the doctors and pharmacies liked it – all of this is academic.... KEEP READING

The GOP will send Capitol Hill its youngest-ever woman, 30-year-old Rep.-elect Elise Stefanik (N.Y.); its first black female Republican, Rep.-elect Mia Love (Utah); and the first female Republican senators from two states, Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.) and Joni Ernst (Iowa), who is also the first female combat veteran to be elected to the chamber.

“These were strong female candidates that had to get through tough primaries, even before the general election,” a representative for the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) told The Hill. “They had great backgrounds and could go tell voters what they planned to do. They were all very impressive.”

With the second anniversary of the Newtown school shootings this weekend, a new Pew Research Center Poll finds a majority of Americans now say it is more important to protect the right of citizens to own guns than it is to restrict gun ownership.

Additionally, a new and even larger majority of Americans believes gun ownership does more to protect personal safety than endanger it....

This month Pew found 52% said protecting gun ownership rights was more important than restricting ownership, which 46% said was more important.

That's a substantial swing in 23 months. In the immediate emotional aftermath of Newtown, President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden launched a major drive to push more gun ownership restrictions through Congress. Back then, gun control drew 51% support while gun rights drew only 45%. But the administration's plans still failed on Capitol Hill.

A flock of (relatively) new conservative media sites have gained attention in the mainstream-ish media over the past few weeks, a function of their increased role in driving political attention and, in some cases, their savvy in redirecting Facebook's traffic hose toward themselves. Bloomberg's Dave Weigel notes a ◼ series of scoops from the Washington Free Beacon (largely focused on Hillary Clinton); at Slate, Betsy Woodruff ◼ explains Twitchy. At the Awl, John Herrman ◼ noted the rise of the Independent Journal Review, which "landed big" on Facebook.

For all of this success, for all of the novelty of new sites with sharp designs and well-considered social strategies, publishers will note that there's something to be said for another genre of political news site: the old-school, poorly designed link blog.

The obvious example here is Drudge. Matt Drudge's Drudge Report isn't the elephant in the room, it's the Sun in the old-school linkblog solar system. The Drudge Report has been a massive traffic driver for years, and continues to be. And it looks like it was written by hand in 1996, which, perhaps, it was. Let's apply a new-web technique to make the point. The Drudge Report, as seen in 2001 and 2014.

(1) Democrats relied heavily on legacy candidates — and lost nevertheless.... The obvious implication for 2016 is that the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton, is something of a legacy candidate too....

(2) Voters today increasingly vote straight party tickets....

(3) Old political species — Blue Dog Democrats, Rockefeller Republicans — are pretty much extinct....

(4) Today’s political map looks static, but may be a little more fluid than many think....

(5) Republican strength is at historic highs. The party holds more House and state legislative seats than it has since the 1920s and only one less Senate seat than its post-1920s high. The 2008 Obama coalition which, some argued would dominate politics for decades, has been fraying: blacks and gentry liberals remain faithful, but Hispanics and millennials are falling away, while Jacksonians grow increasingly opposed.... READ IT ALL, CLICK HERE

The poll also found that a majority of those polled are “at least somewhat bothered” by Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber’s comments regarding a lack of transparency and the “stupidity of the American voter” contributing to the passing of the law....

Additionally, 28 percent of those polled say they are worse off due to Obamacare.

Now, the leader of those bureaucrats and, thus, the person responsible (notionally) for the roll-out, Kathleen Sebelius, says that its a branding problem. The name by which most people know the bill – “Obamacare” – has become toxic.

“Obamacare, no question, has a very bad brand that has been driven intentionally by a lot of misinformation and a lot of paid advertising, and I think we may need to call it something in the future different, but it’s working,” she said at an event hosted by Politico.

Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber admitted to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that Obamacare contained tax hikes, contradicting the Obama administration’s narrative that it was not a tax.

[T]he Americans for Prosperity Foundation is saying the state of California is improperly demanding information about its donors – and is threatening unusually harsh penalties if the group doesn’t comply. One other conservative group has filed a separate lawsuit against the attorney general, which is now in the Ninth Circuit.

Tax-exempt charitable groups are required to file an annual report (Form 990) with the IRS and a separate form (Schedule B) listing the names and addresses of people who donate more than $5,000 in one year. The 990 is a public document – but the IRS must keep the donor information private.... KEEP READING

For a Dec. 8 piece, Cosmopolitan’s senior political writer Jill Filipovic interviewed Cecile Richards, president of taxpayer-funded Planned Parenthood, on “where the pro-choice movement is headed next year.” Richards admitted her organization wants to “make it completely unacceptable” for “someone who opposes women’s rights” to run for office....

“Women may not get up every morning thinking about what constitutional rights they have,” she argued, “but they certainly do get up thinking about their health and the health of their families, and that includes reproductive health care.” Yes, nothing says healthy families like infanticide.

The incoming Republican majority in the Senate passed a new rule that requires them to live by the law that Democrats championed — and pointed out that Democrats have yet to do so. Until now, a loophole in federal law allowed both caucuses to designate their staffs as “unofficial,” meaning that they were not required to get their health insurance through ObamaCare. ◼ The Hill reports that Republicans have thrown down the gauntlet to their Democratic counterparts ◼ (via Instapundit):

A loophole used in both chambers allows lawmakers to designate staff as “unofficial” or “official staff,” which permits them to keep their insurance coverage under the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program.

“Republican senators made a strong, principled statement today in passing my resolution,” Vitter said in a statement.

“Washington should have to live under ObamaCare just like everybody else until we repeal it. And we won’t be complicit in Obama’s illegal rule designed to protect Washington insiders.”

If you listen to the increasingly few Democrats who will still stand up for ObamaCare, you'll hear the same old talking points: It's lowering costs! It's providing quality coverage for millions! It's working! People love it, but they don't know that they love it!

What you won't hear them talk about is the fact that some of their staffers were exempted from it, and were allowed to keep their policies via the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program.

Nurtured in the Saul Alinsky-style, ACORN-esque tactics of organizing revolution under the banner of "social change," Barack Obama, as a young community organizer in Chicago in the 1980s understood early on the importance of a crisis and how to ride the waves of an emergency to effect the fundamental transformation of society.

As the nation’s chief executive, President Obama has demonstrated a particular specialty in the use and perpetuation of crises to push through policies that the public otherwise might not willingly accept, including the wildly unpopular healthcare law, immigration reform, and the first-term "stimulus" legislation. It is therefore unsurprising to detect the international export of the Obama’s “crisis” game plan to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

A dispassionate look at the sequence of events shows that the Obama administration has generated an unprecedented crisis in US-Israeli relations, a crisis utilized at every twist and turn by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political rivals, most notably those within his coalition, to try to shake up the country’s leadership. There is more than a hint of White House interference in helping to agitate the coalition drama that provoked Netanyahu’s hesitant decision last Tuesday to dissolve parliament and schedule early elections that could potentially see the prime minister unseated.

Before divining the Obama administration’s fingerprints on the events that led to Netanyahu’s predicament, the immediate question is just what about the Israeli premier makes him so problematic for this White House. The answer is fraught with policy implications that cut to the very heart of Obama’s dangerously myopic, academic view of the world and America’s place among friend and foe....

The program, known as Operation Choke Point, has been the focus of a House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform probe for nearly a year.

The Department of Justice's role in pressuring banks to drop the accounts of businesses deemed "objectionable" or "high-risk" by officials in President Obama's administration was described in a May congressional report, but the committee’s latest findings point to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation as playing a significant role in the effort.

FDIC officials produced the list of risky industries that later became the targets of Justice Department subpoenas, according to the report. Bank regulators grouped legal businesses such as home-based charities and firearms sales with “patently illegal” forms of commerce like pornography and “racist materials” in a 2011 article obtained by the committee.

NBC News on Tuesday finally devoted a segment to covering MIT health economist Jonathan Gruber and his controversial statements regarding the Affordable Care Act’s “lack of transparency” and the “stupidity of the American voter.”

Gruber, one of the chief architects of Obamacare, appeared before Congress Tuesday to testify on his role in creating the massive healthcare law and his remarks on its questionable passage.

“[I]t is unlikely that most Americans have heard the name Jonathan Gruber until a few weeks ago, when a video emerged of him insulting their intelligence,” NBC News’s Brian Williams said in a Dec. 9 newscast.

Reports that Gruber said at an event in 2013 that Obamacare passed thanks to law’s “lack of transparency” and the “stupidity of the American voter” date back to Nov. 7....

...At the hearing Gruber was asked by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) about a paper he co-authored in 1998, “Abortion Legalization and Child Living Circumstances: Who is the ‘Marginalized Child’,” in which Gruber suggested that children who die as a result of abortion are better off because the majority of them would have ended up in single-parent households and living in poverty.

“So, this gets me to another instance where you committed candor,” Massie said in the hearing. “You conclude legal abortion — and birth outcomes among a birth cohort … and on page 26, you state that your research indicates that the legalization of abortion saved the government $14 billion in welfare payments through 1994,” he continued. “Is providing more access to abortion, is that a worthy social outcome to achieve cost savings for the government?”

Leadership: As Congress races to pass a budget and avoid a government shutdown, Republican leaders need to slow down, take a deep breath and ask themselves if they really want to betray their historic victory at the polls.

Signs are already popping up that the budget deal being worked on behind the scenes will be a big disappointment to voters who thought they were voting for big change in Washington.

Newly elected conservative members, part of the historic GOP wave in 2014, fear Speaker John Boehner is working with other GOP leaders and Democrats on a $1 trillion-plus omnibus budget that end-runs conservatives, with few members having even read it....

The speaker and other GOP moderates fear they, and not the Democrats, will be blamed for shutting down the government. And polls show they may be right.

Even so, the GOP won a sweeping victory in November, giving it the strongest position in the House since 1929. That didn't happen because voters wanted more of what Democrats offered. They wanted real change.

ANALYSIS/OPINION: Call it the mysterious case of the Incredible Shrinking GOP.

Barely one month ago, the party sailed to victory in one of the biggest rout election waves of the past century. They ran the board and took control of the U.S. Senate. They grew to historic levels in the U.S. House. The Democratic Party was left in tatters in state, local and governor races across the country....

But today, just a few weeks later, before GOPers even take hold of their new reins of power, the party is crying poverty. They are stricken with paralysis. House Speaker John A. Boehner, known for his weeping, begs powerlessness.

“Frankly, we have limited options and limited abilities to deal with it directly,” Mr. Boehner said last week when asked about President Obama’s unconstitutional executive action to grant amnesty to millions of illegal aliens presently living illegally in the U.S.

“Limited options?” “Limited abilities?” We have an unbridled madman in the White House right now taking a machete to the U.S. Constitution and the leader of the opposition party that was just thrust to power in a historic rejection of the president and his cleptocratic policies is now talking about “limited” options and abilities?

Funny, I don’t recall a single Republican running in a single race this year on a campaign that Republicans in Congress have only “limited” options and abilities to stop Mr. Obama. No, in fact, every single one of them ran their entire campaigns on the singular promise that we have to vote for Republicans so they could stop Mr. Obama. And Americans voted.

Now the chads have not even settled yet and already we are being told the whole meaning of the election is something different now. Now that they have won.

Either Republicans did not really believe their campaign promises, they were lying or they are just scared to keep those promises to stand up to Mr. Obama and do everything in their power to stop him....

Voters handed you more power than they have trusted you with in nearly a decade. Now is the time to use that power with wisdom and vision and principle.

If not now, when? If not right after winning a landslide election, when?

On page 217, Title VI of the bill, is the “Travel Promotion, Enhancement and Modernization Act of 2014.” It reauthorizes, extends, and changes the “Travel Promotion Act of 2009”—which, as Breitbart News has previously reported, is a nothing more than a kickback to Reid and his casino pals in Las Vegas.

This omnibus spending bill—which is supposed to be just an Appropriations bill, not dealing with reauthorizations like this—reauthorizes the Travel Promotion Act program for five extra years through 2020. It was supposed to sunset and end in 2015, and probably would have under a Republican-controlled Congress. Yet since Boehner is working to cut this deal with the Democrats in the lame duck post-election session of Congress rather than doing a clean Continuing Resolution (CR) when the new GOP Senate takes over, he included it in this bill.

Pages 958 and 959 of the 1,603-page omnibus spending bill from House Speaker John Boehner include a provision that gives Social Security benefits to illegal aliens under President Barack Obama’s executive amnesty....

By not including language saying that Social Security benefits can’t go to illegal aliens under the executive amnesty—just as they didn’t include language going after funding for the implementation of the executive amnesty itself—Republicans are completely surrendering, ensuring that millions of illegal aliens will get Social Security.

Speaker John Boehner has been working with Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader, and her whip Steny Hoyer to try to wrangle enough Democratic votes for the bill as Boehner won’t be able to pass it with Republican votes. But on Wednesday Pelosi expressed serious concerns with elements of the bill.

Quite by design, at 11:00 AM Eastern Time, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, encouraged by the Democrat-controlled Senate and the Obama Administration, released a 528 ◼ Executive Summary of its $40 million, 6,000 page "Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program," uncovering the impropriety of ◼ methods used by the CIA to obtain information from high-ranking Al-Qaida and other terrorist groups responsible for the Trade Center bombing, among other things. The report is critical of the "enhanced interrogation" technique known as "waterboarding," plus other "tortures," such as playing loud music and sleep deprivation. Former senator Bob Kerrey (D-NE) ◼ writing in USA Today said, "I do not need to read the report to know that the Democrat staff alone wrote it. The Republicans checked out early when they determined that their counterparts started out with the premise that the CIA was guilty and then worked to prove it." They interviewed no CIA participants; issued no indictments or recommendations. The report will certainly be used to feed enemy terrorist propaganda....

The media is claiming CIA Director John Brennan is angry about the release of the CIA report…. Horsepucky! That is a complete and total ruse meant to deflect attention away from the real reasons why the former White House advisor, and fellow ideological traveler, was selected for the top job in the CIA.

Secondly, while the leftist ideologues are in a drama induced apoplectic feint about the Democrat Committee reports’ content, there is nothing within the report that is as bad as the previous leaks -around content- would have led anyone to believe.

However, that said, what the report does do is effectively accomplish it’s inherent goal. The goal of the report was to further diminish the influence of America through President Obama’s preferred method of Alinsky tactics: Isolate, Ridicule, Marginalize.

An Islamic court ruled that he should be flung from the highest building
They posted the graphic images on a jihadist website
It is unknown whether the man died instantly from his injuries
This is the third execution for homosexuality in less than a month
WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT

Sen. Mark Udall accused the CIA of continuing to mislead Congress and the public about his agency’s use of extreme interrogation techniques and called on President Obama to purge the agency of its top leadership, including Director John Brennan.

...“The president believes he has done an exemplary job in both of those roles,” Earnest said.

The comments sharply contrast Udall’s description of Brennan’s record at the CIA and the White House.

Udall accused the 25-year veteran of the CIA of trying to cover up a review of the extreme interrogation practices undertaken by Leon Panetta, Obama’s first CIA director. He also charged Brennan with “clinging to a false narrative about the effectiveness of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program.”

Peppered with questions about the effectiveness of the interrogation tactics, Earnest repeatedly declined to say whether the program produced actionable intelligence that helped save American lives, as Brennan forcefully argued in a statement reacting to the report’s release Tuesday.

In outlining his criticisms of the CIA’s “dismissive” reaction to the Senate investigators, Udall cited factual disparities between Brennan’s responses to committee questions and the Panetta Review. He said Senate staff obtained a partial version of the review when the agency inadvertently provided access to it during the panel’s nearly six-year investigation.

“In my view, the Panetta Review is a smoking gun,” he said, calling for the declassification and release of the entire review.

The entire Senate review, he said, leads to a “disturbing” discovery — that Brennan and the CIA are continuing to provide inaccurate information about the efficacy of the interrogation program.

As investigation into Rolling Stone’s sensational story about an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia continues, the story unravels further. The Washington Post has interviewed the three friends who saw the alleged victim, Jackie, after the alleged assault. They say that their interactions with her were completely different from the utterly implausible callousness described by Sabrina Erdely, Rolling Stone’s reporter.

Most damning is the fact that what Jackie told them about what happened to her was totally different from what Erdely reported. No fraternity was mentioned. Jackie told her friends she was going on a dinner date with an upperclassman that night, but it seems clear that the person she described was an imaginary friend, complete with photographs of someone she barely knew in high school, taken apparently from a social media site. It turned out, too, that the name that Jackie gave for the person with whom she had a date on the night of the alleged rape was not the name of anyone who has ever attended the University of Virginia. Subsequently, she gave a different name for the person with whom she had the alleged date....

Consider the almost comically inept, and entirely unethical, reporting of Rolling Stone in the matter of the gang-rape allegation at the University of Virginia: the university’s ham-fisted overreaction in suspending all fraternities and sororities; the enraged protests; the subsequent media firestorms and sociological navel-gazing; and — most important — the fact that all of the preceding was based on a fiction that nobody bothered to try to verify. Taken together, that constitutes an excellent argument for something we already know: that there is only one public institution well suited to dealing with rape and other crimes, and it is the criminal-justice system.

The odd and lamentable encroachment of deans of students and other university administrators into a field that is properly the responsibility of police and prosecutors is a worst-of-both-worlds outcome...

A new video, uncovered by GotNews founder and conservative activist Charles Johnson, depicts the author of the debunked Rolling Stone University of Virginia rape story saying that she “absolutely” shops around for stories that fit the narratives she wants to tell. (RELATED: UVA Gang Rape Story Falls To Pieces, Rolling Stone Admits It Was Fooled)

...“Yes, I absolutely do. In fact, I’m working on one right now where that’s the case,” Erdley replied. “That’s something I’ve done a lot when I’ve written for women’s magazines, where I’ve written a lot about women’s health and women’s rights.”

She gave the example of how she once wanted to write about domestic violence, but was looking for the perfect victim to share their story.

“It’s very hard when you find a topic, and then you want to find the story,” she continued. “Because then you want to find the right story.” She explained how she sometimes has to hold pre-interviews and “tryouts” to find the right victim....

After reading this article in the WaPo, we can safely say that it now appears likely that UVA’s Jackie didn’t just lie about whether she was raped at a fraternity. She appears to have lied about almost everything connected with whatever did or did not happen during some sort of incident that may or may not have occurred, and about the immediate aftermath.

Other than that, a very believable narrator.

Or maybe it was reporter Erdely who is responsible for some of the lies. At this point, we can be forgiven if we have trouble sorting it out....

There’s more, lots more, but you get the idea. It’s becoming more and more apparent that Jackie is most likely a fabulist, perhaps with some pre-existing mental/emotional problems, that it’s time for Erdely and the editors at Rolling Stone to choose another profession. However, I wonder whether there will be any repercussions for any of this.

Welcome

I would like to introduce myself. I am John Schutt the new chairman of the Humboldt County Republican Central Committee. I'd like to ask each one of you to send me your thoughts and ideas on making Humboldt great again. I also am asking for your help, need republicans for open spots on the central committee, committee seats, letters to the editor writers, and many other opportunities. The 2018 election for governor and other seats is just around the corner and we will need all your help. Please feel free to call the office (442-2259) or leave a message here (or on Facebook) and I will get back to you as soon as possible.